


Bury my Dreams, dig up my Sorrows

by pseudosmodingium



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Archangels, Coda, First Kiss, M/M, Post-Episode: s15e18 Despair, Saving the World, Series Finale Speculation, Time Travel Fix-It, saving cas
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-08
Updated: 2020-11-08
Packaged: 2021-03-08 23:34:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,925
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27455062
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pseudosmodingium/pseuds/pseudosmodingium
Summary: All is lost. Humanity has vanished, Cas is gone for good. But there might still be a beacon of hope out there in this vast, empty world.
Relationships: Castiel/Dean Winchester
Comments: 4
Kudos: 111





	Bury my Dreams, dig up my Sorrows

**Author's Note:**

> Gay love pierced through the veil of death and got me out of my writing slump.

The phone in his hand keeps vibrating, Sam’s name flashing on the screen, but Dean barely even notices. He is paralyzed, shell-shocked. The wall behind him is ice-cold. Solid, silent. Like it hadn’t just born a portal to another dimension and sucked Cas into it to trap him there for all eternity.

_Cas…_

Why would he do such a thing? Why would he say all the things he said…knowing they would conjure this cosmic entity and drag him away to this awful fate? Away from Dean.

He shouldn’t have. They might have found a way. They might have defeated Billy after all. They…

Dean let’s out another heavy sob. Did Cas really mean what he said or was it just a trick to summon the Empty? How could his words be true?

His phone purrs again. A text message from Sam. _Dean? Are you OK? Please answer your phone, please!!_ Then, _We’re almost at the bunker._

He doesn’t have the strength to reply. Cas’s confession plays in his head, over and over.

_I love you._

_I love you._

I love you.

The phone slips out of his hand. He doesn’t know how much time passes between him curling up on the floor and Sam’s voice echoing through the bunker, calling out his and Cas’s names.

“Dean!” His brother comes running at him. “Dean, I’m so glad you’re still here.” He pulls Dean into his arms. “You’re still here.”

“You scared me, Dean,” he says, drawing back and taking his brother’s face into his hands. “Why didn’t you answer your phone?”

Dean can’t bear looking him in the eyes.

“Dean,” Sam repeats with more intent, “what happened? Where’s Cas?”

Dean feels himself collapsing again, only held up by his brother’s grip. He shakes his head.

Realization dawns on Sam. “What happened?”

Dean makes an attempt at a reply but only ends up hyperventilating.

“Hey,” Sam says and gently slaps his face, “hey, breathe, man, just breathe.”

He tries to focus on Sam’s voice, the only steady thing in his troubled life, calming. He gulps around the lump in his throat and, hoarsely, he says, “The Empty.”

Sam’s responding look is all confusion. “The Empty? What, how? I thought the Empty couldn’t enter this world unless—”

“Unless it’s summoned,” Jack says from where he stands in the doorway.

Sam turns to look at him then back at Dean. “I… I don’t understand. Who summoned it?”

“It was his deal, wasn’t it?” Jack says.

Dean’s chin drops towards his chest, his head no longer supported by his brother’s hands.

“Dean?” Sam says. “What deal? What did he do?”

Jack steps inside the room. “When I was in Heaven,” he says, “the Empty came for me. Castiel offered to take him instead. He saved me.”

“But why now? Why did it come for him now?”

“It’s not important,” Dean says and stumbles to get to his feet, Sam grabbing him under the arm when he threatens to fall back again.

“Cas is gone,” he says, voice rasp, “He saved me too. And now we need to fix it, to make things right.”

“Dean, wait,” Sam says, “what about Billie? Do you know what she did?”

“Billy is gone, too. The Empty got to her. Chuck is still in the race. It was all him. He made all the Apocalypse World people disappear.”

Sam rubs his hands down his face. “Dean, listen. It’s everyone! Everyone is gone but us.”

“What are you saying?”

“We’re the only ones left. You, Jack and me, all the others have ceased to exist. Chuck wiped everyone else out. It has started, Dean. Our world is dying.”

“There must be something. Anything,” Sam whines and slams another doorstopper of a leather-bound anthology of cosmic magic shut.

“Accept it, Sam,” Dean says, sitting at the other end of the table and drinking his whiskey straight from the bottle, “we’ve lost. Game over.”

“Stop it, Dean! Just…stop it.” He’s pulling at his hair. “I can’t believe you’re giving up like this. We’re still here and we have a responsibility—”

“Really?” Dean says, forcefully knocking the bottle against the wooden surface of the table. “Who says we do? ‘Cause as far as I’m concerned, we’re done. There’s nobody left we could owe anything anymore.”

“I get it Dean, it seems hopeless. We’ve lost everyone. And now Cas is gone, too. But I’ve just lost someone I really, really cared about. I’ve lost Eileen and I still kept going. You have no idea how this is.”

Dean jumps and his chair falls over in the process. “You shut your mouth!” He’s yelling. “You think I don’t know how you feel?” Tears come back to his eyes and his voice breaks. “You have no clue… You have no fucking clue,” he says, knocking his fingers against his chest, emphasizing his words. “My heart is broken. I am…broken, you understand? I can’t do this anymore. I’ve lost too much.”

“Dean, I—”

“Guys!” Jack interrupts. “I think I found something.”

The Impala stops in front of a church, a brick building with two tall, hostile looking towers. A pink light shines through the rosette window—a beacon of life in this dead world.

“This is it,” Jack says. “The voice is coming from in there.”

They’ve been following the signal Jack picked up on angel radio. It’s mostly static now but then, he was able discern a single voice. It wasn’t really calling anyone, it was just there singing to itself.

“What should we expect?” Sam says.

“A voice on angel radio?” Dean says, taking two angel blades out of the trunk. “Sounds pretty angelic to me.”

“What if it’s a trap?”

“We’re already trapped,” Dean says and closes the trunk. “Here,” he hands Sam one of the blades. “Jack, you stay behind us. Let the grown-ups do the talking.” Then, to Sam, “Ready?” and Sam nods, his jaw clenched.

They each throw open one side of the church portal, blades drawn. Some of the votive candles in the side-aisles are still lit. Cautiously, they advance towards the altar, past empty pews, only to find a single man sitting in the third row, his head bowed in prayer.

“And I thought I was the only one left,” he says without turning his head.

“Michael,” Sam realizes.

“The one and only,” he says and finally turns around. “Well, the only remaining Michael, at least.”

“What are you doing here?” Dean asks.

“Waiting,” he says, “and where else could I go?”

“Waiting for whom?” Sam asks.

“For God.” He leaves the bench to stand before them. “All this time, before the Apocalypse, before the cage, I’ve been waiting for him to come to me, to answer my prayers.”

“Why do you think he would come now?” Dean says.

“If there isn’t anyone else left in the world, perhaps… But as I’m seeing now, I was wrong. The Winchesters are still standing. Why would that even surprise me…” He spins on his heel and looks up at the monumental painting over the altar. It shows God, reaching out to his human flock on earth, little angels surrounding his throne in the clouds. The artist clearly had no idea what’s up.

“Listen, Michael, Adam, whoever,” Dean says, “you gotta help us. You can’t let him win.”

The angel looks at him over his shoulder. “And what exactly is your plan, Dean?”

Dean looks at the floor in defeat but Sam throws in, “We don’t have a plan, that’s the point. We came here, hoping to find someone who could help us, who might stand a chance against Chuck. And I think you can.”

“You’re overestimating my power, Sam. I can’t kill God.”

“But together we might,” Jack says, stepping up from behind Sam and Dean who is about to scold him for not keeping quiet but Sam signals him to let him talk with an elbow to his arm.

“A nephilim and and an archangel,” Michael says, “interesting.”

“Could you do it, if you had Jack by your side?” Sam asks.

Michael shrugs. “We will see.”

“Is that a yes?”

“Now what’s your plan, Michael. How do we get to God? We can’t just wait and hope he’ll show up eventually,” Dean says when they’re back at the bunker.

“Yeah, about that…”

“What?” Dean barks.

“I don’t actually think he and I will be enough,” he says, gesturing towards Jack.

“Are you fucking kidding me? Why did you come with us? Why this farce?”

“Don’t forget who you’re talking to, Dean,” Michael says and comes almost nose to nose with him, but Sam interjects, “What do we do then, Michael?”

“My brothers,” he says, “the other archangels. Us plus the nephilim could stand a chance against God, I think.”

Dean pinches the spot between his eyes. “Michael, I know you’ve been locked in a cage for a while and you might have missed a memo or two, but they’re all dead. You’re the only archangel we’ve got.”

“Hasn’t the Empty just opened a door to its dimension a few hours ago?”

“How do you—”

“The world has become quiet lately. Not so hard to discern an event like this.”

“You want to summon the Empty and negotiate. How would you even get to it? We can’t risk killing you for a quick talk.”

“You won’t have to.” There’s a sly smile on his face and Dean doesn’t like it one bit. “You know, since it’s been a while that the angels lost their wings and much of their power, you might have forgotten about a thing I’m capable of.”

“Time travel,” Sam utters.

“Exactly,” the angel says. “and I don’t even need the strength to travel back very far. Only a few hours.”

Dean feels himself trembling. His breath falters as he says, “But what about Billie?” _What about Cas?_ He doesn’t even dare to think the unspoken part of his question. He can’t get his hopes up again.

“That’s where you come in,” Michael says. “You were there. You know what’s happening. That’s why I need you to come with me.”

He and Sam talk it out for a minute. There isn’t much to say. They’re fucked either way so they might as well trust the archangel who intended to kill them all those years ago. And then there might even be a possibility that—no, Dean can’t got there. He needs to focus now.

They end up a bit off the mark. They’re in the hallway and Dean sees Billie hammer against the warded door. Dean’s head is spinning. He hasn’t missed time travel or angel flight one bit.

“Let’s go,” Michael urges him and Dean is running towards Billie before he even realizes that his feet have started to move.

The door breaks and Billie is sucked into the room by the dark force that is the Empty. Dean keeps running, right into Cas and knocking them both to the floor, while Michael has burst into a white light, holding off the black goo that’s coming from the whole in the wall. Dean’s other self has disappeared or he is him now but he still remembers what just happened in the future. The metaphysics of time travel will forever be a mystery to him.

He’s pressing Cas’s body to the floor with his, shielding him from the threat that’s currently kept at bay by the archangel. Then it stops. The portal has closed and Michael is gone.

“Dean, what?”

“Where did he go?”

“Dean, what just happened? What was that light?”

He is torn between finishing their conversation from before and doing what’s right and that is calling Sam and telling him to get his and Jack’s asses here ASAP.

He leads Cas out into the hallway. He can’t trust that portal not to open again.

He pushes Cas against the wall, his mind racing with all the things still unsaid, how to even begin or perhaps explaining the situation beforehand. Instead he cups Cas’s jaw with his left hand and kisses him hard.

“Don’t you ever do that again,” he whispers against Cas’s lips and Cas promptly claims back his.

“Dean, I never thought…”

“That’s right, you didn’t.” Again, they kiss.

“I love you, Cas. I love you so much.”

Both their faces are wet from crying. Eventually, Dean let’s go to call Sam, puts him on speaker and explains what happened for everyone to follow.

Sam and Jack have hardly entered the bunker when the walls begin to shake. They all meet in the library, the bunker’s alarms are going off the rails. Then, all of a sudden, they find themselves in a field. No, not a field, a cemetery. Stull.

“I should have ended it here. It was a perfect ending.” They all turn to see Chuck standing behind them. “But you couldn’t just leave it there, could you? And whose fault was it, huh? _You,”_ he says, glaring at Cas, but Dean steps between them. “You couldn’t just leave Sam’s broken soul in Hell. You couldn’t just let Dean wallow in his grief over his brother and move on. You were a mistake, Castiel.”

“Stop it!” Dean snaps at him.

“An angel and a human,” Chuck sneers. “How very boring. You think you’re special, you two. There have been others, you know, reaching for the forbidden fruit. I planted all kinds of rules into your angelic brains but that just didn’t stop some of you from going out and falling for a small, insignificant human. But in all my time witnessing this kind of disobedience, you have been the worst example. No matter how many times I wrote you out of this story, you kept coming back, like an itch I could never scratch.”

“Don’t listen to him, Cas,” Dean says, still standing between them.

“Oh, don’t worry, Dean, he never did. Neither of you!”

The earth trembles and Chuck, to Dean’s surprise, looks confused. He rolls his eyes. “What the fuck did you do this time?”

Beneath a stone angel, Michael appears, the shadow of his wings spreading behind him.

“Son,” Chuck acknowledges him.

“Hi, Dad.”

“Don’t tell me you’re in cahoots with the Winchesters now.”

“Depends on what your apology is for letting me rot in Hell and ignoring me ever since.”

Dean gulps. Maybe they thought Michael on their side too soon.

“Uh, you know, been busy.”

“Sure,” Michael says.

Chuck claps his hands together. “What if we skip the therapy session and come right to the point?”

“I’d love that,” Michael says and as if on cue, bright lights come flanking him, the earth shakes once more and suddenly, an ear-splitting whistling sound forces Dean and Sam to their knees. Everyone else, Cas, Jack, seem unbothered.

Cas crouches next to him, holds him. “It can’t be,” he says but Dean can barely hear his own thoughts over that painful noise.

“Why?” Chuck says.

“You know,” Michael says, “after all these years of wrath, of yearning for the Apocalypse to end it all, I’ve come to like this world, its people. Turns out humans aren’t so bad after all.”

“And I thought you were the proverbial exception that proves the rule.”

Michael shrugs. “While I was in the cage, I’ve had some time to think, all the while I had good company. Turns out I’m not.”

“What about your brothers then? How did they get here?”

“Well, how I could go out trying to stop God all by myself?”

He chuckles. “But I’m not just God, don’t you see? I am the Light and the Dark, the Yin and the Yang. I am whole.”

“You are _broken,_ Father. You always have been.” Cas is doing his best to shield him and Sam from the angel voices and prevent their heads from exploding, so Dean only barely registers when Michael calls Jack to him.

It all happens so fast or maybe it’s because Dean passes out not long into the fight. When he comes to, the world is still there, Sam is there and Cas, holding him in his arms, and so are Jack and Michael. But Chuck is gone. Instead, Amara is back. Dean isn’t exactly sure now if this is good or bad news.

As it turns out, she helped defeat her brother from the inside, to save this beautiful, unique world, as she claims. The other three archangels are gone again. Somehow, Michael managed to convince the Empty to borrow those three of its possessions for one last fight and helped to make it quiet again and let it go back to sleep. He could convince it that Cas would only cause trouble again so it would let him go for now.

Amara, on the other hand, undid Chuck’s latest havoc and brought all the people back into existence, even those who didn’t originate from here. All the other worlds are still gone, however, irrecoverable.

She and Michael also say to take on Heaven and keep it from falling apart, maybe checking in for a helping hand from Jack sooner or later. Cas says he hopes the angels will listen to the archangel but he’s quite certain they’ll announce him their new King of Heaven in no time.

“And for us,” Cas says, “I think we have a lot to talk about.”

Dean smiles at him, slipping his hand into Cas’s. “Yes, we do.”

They walk over to where Sam and Jack are still talking to Michael and Amara and Dean lays his free hand on Sam’s shoulder. “Let’s go home.”

**Author's Note:**

> The title of this fic was taken from the Nightwish song "Angels Fall First". (I am lazy when it comes to titles and they just have a lot of songs about angels...I can't help it.)
> 
> Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this little coda/fix-it. Leave me kudos and/or a comment if you did :) they're always appreciated <3


End file.
